AMD shares more details on Radeon VII

AMD Radeon Vega II = VII = 7 (nm)

Some say that Radeon VII took everyone by surprise, others think it was imminent. The reality is that AMD is not abandoning high-performance graphics just yet, as the company is still planning to compete with NVIDIA Turing.

AMD Radeon VII featuring 7nm Vega architecture comes with 3840 Stream Processors, which means that the GPU does not have all cores enabled. To justify the cost, the full chip is likely reserved for Radeon Pro/Instinct series. Unless AMD is still planning to introduce the full GPU for gaming, we simply don’t know yet.

What we have learned from AMD presentation is that 7nm 331 mm2 GPU will compete against 12nm 545 mm2 processor from NVIDIA. But can both silicons even be compared, if the latter comes with additional cores for deep learning and ray tracing? Probably not, they are not even on the same node.

AMD Radeon VII will not compete with TITAN RTX, it will not compete with RTX 2080 Ti either. Instead, AMD is focusing on GeForce RTX 2080, the 8GB GDDR6 replacement for GeForce GTX 1080 Ti.

AMD solution features twice as much memory (16 vs 8GB), which is also twice as fast (1 TB/s vs 0.45 TB/s). It does not have Tensor Cores or RT Cores equivalent but is this really that important considering how few games support DXR?

We have no way of knowing how power efficient 7nm Vega really is, this will be verified by independent reviews as they drop around February 7th.

AMD Radeon VII Specifications

VideoCardz.com

Radeon VII

Radeon RX Vega 64

Radeon RX Vega 56

GeForce RTX 2080

GPU

7nm Vega

14nm Vega

14nm Vega

12nm TU104

Die Size

331 mm2

495 mm2

495 mm2

545 mm2

Unified Cores

3840

4096

3584

2944

Base Clock

1450 MHz

1247 MHz

1156 MHz

1515 MHz

Boost Clock

1800 MHz

1546 MHz

1471 MHz

1710 MHz

Memory

16 GB HBM2

8 GB HBM2

8 GB HBM2

8 GB GDDR6

Bandwith

1 TB/s

494 GB/s

494 GB/s

448 GB/s

Launch Price

699 USD

599 USD

399 USD

699 USD

Launch Date

February 7th, 2019

August 14th, 2017

August 14th, 2017

Sept. 20th, 2018

Update: AMD also released more gaming performance benchmarks (source: Overclock3D):